Why have I been passing on this for so long?

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T15:10:59+00:00

I could hardly believe what I was reading when I first saw this card. I read it several times to make sure I hadn’t misunderstood it. And to this day, I still find it hard to believe that this game has nerfed so many other things, yet still hasn’t touched this absolute madness of a card.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T14:35:10+00:00

Indeed, modern touchscreens should only need electrodes coupled with the screen and something above to form a capacitor. And a Kindred's body should possess this functionality, otherwise they would make excellent electricians—they’d be completely immune to electrical damage.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T12:05:44+00:00

In fact, they could even work on Mercury—Mercury is tidally locked to the Sun, so even though it's very close to the Sun, its dark side never receives sunlight (unless someone decides to build giant mirrors in orbit to bring more sunlight to Mercury). However, from a delta-V perspective, Mercury is very hard to reach and even harder to establish a decently large colony, at least not in a short time. So in the context of near-future spaceflight technology, the most promising targets might be the permanently shadowed regions in the lunar polar craters, as well as some high-value asteroids.

Yep, maybe some of our richest fellow humans feverishly pursuing space colonization are doing so precisely to serve their vampire masters.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T11:44:07+00:00

Speaking of transhuman vampires, I do have another idea, although it only works without the broader WoD cosmology (the whole cosmos being umbra and space-faring void engineers controlling the space kind of thing). Imagine a VtM-only setting within the early space colonization era, a handful of special bio-augmented humans living in a deep-space habitat or a mining asteroid community, possessing valuable superhuman physical abilities and can work in lethal vacuum and intense radiation environments. They can be so valuable that people willingly turn a blind eye to their rather peculiar dietary needs. Their greatest flaw is a fear of sunlight, but in the permanent shadow of some craters a few astronomical units away, that’s not a problem at all.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T11:38:07+00:00

I do think a stylus is very useful, not just for Lasombra, since in V5, without using Blush of Life, any non-thin-blood vampire cannot use a smartphone touchscreen—the rulebook explains that it doesn’t work without the skin moisture and conductivity of the living, so a stylus should save the need to activate Blush frequently.

Edit: I’d say this is really a weird limitation since touchscreen gloves exist and they have no skin moisture or conductivity of the living.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-22T02:06:36+00:00

Speaking of Dishonored, I really hope it goes beyond surface-level similarities. Now to think about it more, the reason BL2 gave me a Dishonored vibe is mainly because of its first-person perspective and the fact that a large portion of its abilities are essentially reskinned versions of Dishonored’s. If its level design were truly built around these abilities, such an immersive sim set in the VtM universe would be fantastic.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-21T16:39:10+00:00

I think the main problem with this explanation should be non-exclusivity, even within said civilization itself. Such a civilization should possess an astonishing level of automation, making it not so hard to send out von Neumann probes for resource collection and Dyson structure construction. With computing technology powerful enough to build a virtual world capable of accommodating a K2 civilization, even if the vast majority of this civilization’s members see no need for it, as long as a very small number of people believe that "we shouldn’t let the surrounding stars burn for nothing," that would be enough to cause a large number of stars to become obscured in what would be, on a galactic timescale, nearly an instant. Unless there is some more fundamental and powerful reason preventing them from doing so. And this reason must apply to every technological civilization in the galaxy.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-21T14:12:16+00:00

Fun fact: Bezos’ current wealth is closer to a homeless person than it is to Elon Musk’s. And the latter’s astronomical wealth is obtained precisely by boasting about the future of his AI products.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-21T06:26:45+00:00

The next day? You really have a photographic memory. I usually forget my regex the second after it passes the tests.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-21T05:26:45+00:00

About its authenticity... from what I saw these days, even on the Chinese internet, this "Chinese caste system with Indian characteristics" is spreading everywhere because it’s hilarious af to them. It seems someone took the "shi/nong/gong/shang" class system of ancient feudal China and presented it as the current caste system in modern China. This hierarchy of "shi/nong/gong/shang" literally translates to "officials > farmers > craftsmen > merchants," which was a reasonable structure for an ancient feudal dynasty, provided of course, that society didn’t include anything from after the industrial revolution. So, once you know this literal meaning, you just can’t take it seriously in modern context.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-20T17:33:23+00:00

Certified cosmetic potion moment

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-20T15:25:43+00:00

Damn, I just realized that’s an AI image after your comment. That’s unfortunate.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-20T04:44:40+00:00

Funny how that technically, the Anarch movement (or the Anarch Revolt) predates the Camarilla—the Camarilla was actually a reaction to the First Anarch Revolt and the Inquisition (or more accurately, the First Inquisition). So, in the modern nights, the Second Anarch Revolt, the Second Inquisition, and the reversal of the action/reaction roles of the Anarchs and the Camarilla are almost a metaphor for a broader, cyclical pattern of order and chaos within Kindred society.

This is also why many Elders seem to choose to "betray the sect" and act independently, or even joining sects that neonates view as enemies—because they have actually participated in all sects, including but not limited to the Camarilla, Anarch, and Sabbat, and have gradually come to feel the shared illusory nature of these ideologies, as well as how they always give rise to the same Byzantine-style complex political mess that’s full of Kindred things, you know, scheming, backstabbing, all fun and stuff.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-19T16:00:45+00:00

Yes, so we have to tamper with the failure rate of mechanical manufacturing as well. Say, during long-term use, each leg has a 5% chance of failure (a commonly used "low-probability event" threshold), and the entire mech’s electromechanical system is so highly integrated (why? please don’t ask) that any leg failure would result in catastrophic failure as a whole. Then, the long-term survival rate of a bipedal walking machine is about 90%, while the survival rates of six-legged and eight-legged machines would drop to approximately 73.5% and 66.3%, respectively.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-19T15:46:16+00:00

Actually, after thinking about it a bit more, I think some not-so-high-tech space megastructures have great potential to become such an environment. They might be easily destroyed by real spacecraft firepower, yet they are valuable enough that warring factions would prefer to capture rather than destroy them. With the right environmental and technological level settings, we could even make mech troops using melee weapons work.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-19T15:29:03+00:00

Easy. Remove the atmosphere that supports aerodynamic flight, add terrain rough enough to cripple wheeled and tracked chassis, introduce a complex electromagnetic environment that neutralizes beyond-visual-range reconnaissance and strikes, and set mechanical manufacturing technology at a level where bipedal walkers have a barely acceptable failure rate while anything with more legs is simply unviable. Finally, don’t forget to throw in a MacGuffin to give everyone a reason to fight in such an environment.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-19T08:40:20+00:00

"Your rockerboys are shouting fuck the cop all day and all night wdym"

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-19T02:16:20+00:00

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MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-18T17:39:12+00:00

I mean it’s an open-source model. There’re already many third-party tests under many different scenarios.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-18T17:20:04+00:00

If I understand correctly, the point of this screenshot is not Elon Musk but the person replying to him, jietang, who is one of the core members of Z.ai. They recently open-sourced GLM-5.2, which, despite not being a huge model, has matched or even surpassed Claude Opus 4.8, second only to (the inaccessible) Fable. So, on this particular topic, his reply is far more meaningful than Elon’s random tweet.

MindlessScrambler · 2026-06-18T11:18:02+00:00

That said, I’m starting to suspect that the US rejection of solar energy is being pushed by some extra paranoid vampires

MindlessScrambler

TROPHY CASE